The Legislative Yuan will continue its provisional session next week to deal with three non-controversial pieces of legislation on civil servant benefits, despite the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus’ decision to withdraw from the session.
The bills are proposed amendments to the Civil Service Employment Act (公務人員任用法), the Civil Servant Retirement Act (公務人員退休法) and the Civil Service Survivor Relief Act (公務人員撫卹法), according to officials from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus.
Three other bills on the agenda — proposed amendments to the Disaster Prevention and Protection Act (災害防救法) and the National Health Insurance Act (全民健康保險法) and a draft law on farm village rejuvenation — will likely be shelved for further negotiations with the DPP, which has some issues with them, the KMT officials said.
The one-week session, scheduled to run through Wednesday next week, was set up mainly to review the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed in China on Tuesday last week. The ruling and opposition parties, however, disagreed over how the deal should be screened.
The KMT-dominated legislature decided on Thursday to skip a committee review and submit the ECFA directly for a second reading, amid clashes among KMT and DPP legislators.
The DPP caucus, which insisted that the ECFA be sent to committee for a line-item review, decided yesterday to withdraw from the remainder of session in protest. This means that the DPP will not attend any meetings or take part in inter-party negotiations during the period.
Also yesterday, Department of Health Minister Yaung Chih-liang (楊志良) called on the legislators to pass the proposed amendment to the National Health Insurance Act in the special session to facilitate the implementation of second-generation National Health Insurance (NHI) in 2012.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS